Jeffrey Toobin Warns CNN Contributor Andrew McCabe’s Future Now ‘Really Perilous’ Due to Trump’s ‘Grotesque’ Score-Settling
CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin condemned President Donald Trump’s “grotesque” attempts at manipulating the Justice Department for political retribution and warned that fellow network contributor and former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe was in “really perilous condition.”
Toobin made his comments on Don Lemon Tonight in reaction to a new report in the Washington Post that detailed Trump’s frustration with Attorney General Bill Barr because former DOJ officials like James Comey and McCabe haven’t been brought up on criminal charges for their role in investigating him. According to the report, Trump was incensed for days after DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz found Comey had made errors but was not prosecuted, saying “Can you [expletive] believe they didn’t charge him?”
“After learning that the Huber investigation is not likely to produce charges, Trump has become more insistent that [U.S. Attorney John] Durham finish his work soon,” sources close to the president told the Post. “Trump, these people said, wants to be able to use whatever Durham finds as a cudgel in his reelection campaign.”
The details in the story alarmed Toobin, even though he acknowledged that Comey had made mistakes while FBI director.
“Look, you can have grievances with James Comey,” Toobin said. “The idea he committed a crime is absurd. The person in a really perilous condition right now is the CNN contributor Andrew McCabe, who is under investigation from the U.S. Attorney’s office right now. And, you know, has had his case dangling out there. The president obviously wants Andy McCabe prosecuted and it’s just grotesque that you have the President of the United States behaving this way with the power of prosecution exercised in this way.”
“What he’s saying is if Flynn and Stone are going to go to jail or be in jail, shouldn’t Comey and as you say Mccabe. That’s how he feels,” Lemon said, channeling Trump’s view.
“But they did different things!” an exasperated Toobin pointed out. “There’s just — you know, the facts are not — the facts are not identical. So, I mean, just because he likes the two who are prosecuted and doesn’t like the people who weren’t prosecuted, that’s not a reason.”
As the panel laughed in a moment of gallows humor, CNN contributor Garrett Graff weighed in: “That’s the danger of what he’s trying to do to the Justice Department. He doesn’t understand why he can’t direct which people should be heading to jail and which shouldn’t.”
“There’s this old authoritarian line: ‘For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law,'” Post columnist Catherine Rampell added. “And for Trump it’s ‘For my friends, everything; for my enemies, whatever that I conceive of the law and all these imaginary crimes to be.'”
Watch the video above, via CNN.
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com
